Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith review 2005

This review of the sixth Star Wars movie, Revenge of the Sith, ran in The Weekend Australian on Saturday May 21, 2005.

DT-Features Desk 12-May-2005. Must Credit Lucas Film Ltd. Starwars 3 Revenge of the sith . .

This review of the sixth Star Wars movie, Revenge of the Sith, ran in The Weekend Australian on Saturday May 21, 2005.

A truly stellar finale

By Evan Williams

Twenty-two years ago the series seemed to be over. Luke Skywalker had freed Han Solo from Jabba the Hutt’s execution squad in Return of the Jedi, the fragile Republic was safe and balance was restored to the Force. Merely to recall the names of those early characters - Chewbacca, C-3PO, R2-D2 and the Ewoks, Han Solo, Princess Leia and the backward-talking Yoda (most of them still with us, by the way) - is to be reminded of the extraordinary timelessness, the sheer durability of George Lucas’s saga. By any test, the Star Wars films have been Hollywood’s supreme marketing achievement. They belong not so much to movie history as to a shared public memory, permanently embedded in our consciousness.

Lucas’s triumph - even for less than devoted fans - was to create not just a landmark popular entertainment but a complete alternative universe, with its own customs, its own political institutions, its own monsters and aliens and sentient beings.

This was no mean accomplishment. Of course the films were uneven - “their excitement’’, as film historian David Thomson puts it, was “never rooted in character or moral ordeal’’ - but in the epic fantasy business Lucas was competing with Shakespeare, Wagner, Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Frank Herbert and J.K. Rowling. And while there was no way that Episode III - Revenge of the Sith would live up to all our hopes and expectations, there’s a certain galactic justice in the fact that Lucas has brought the series to an end with the best Star Wars movie of all - a cinematic tour de force, resonant, complex and disturbing.

Revenge of the Sith begins and ends with deadly battles, with many battles in between,

as if to remind us that Star Wars is, after all, about wars, and that other diversions, such as love affairs and political intrigues, are beside the point.

Episode II, you may recall, ended with the marriage of Padme Amidala (Natalie Portman), Naboo’s queen, and handsome young Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen), trained in the Jedi arts by Obi-Wan Kenobi. While audiences were probably grateful for a little interstellar romance, the new film - with its clashing armies, endless aerial dogfights and swooshing weaponry - somehow feels more at home, more in tune with its origins, more authentic. This is what Star Wars is about!

Its theme - the theme of the whole prequel trilogy - is how Anakin becomes Darth Vader, the leader of the evil Sith, before Amidala gives birth to her twin children (Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia), who are destined to depose Vader in the final instalments.

If these words make little sense you are clearly not a hard-core Star Wars fan. But I have long been reconciled to the fact that Lucas’s plotting, his complex genealogies, the absurd political alliances, are not what made the films enjoyable. What matters is their incomparable sense of spectacle, the surreal visual invention that informs every scene.

There are breathtaking images in Revenge of the Sith, surpassing anything in the earlier films: vast cityscapes with their teeming, monumental structures; armies of droids; primordial landscapes with their measureless caverns and boiling rivers of lava. The interior sets - the Republican council chamber, and what looks like a theatre with abstract holographic images - are no less remarkable.

It doesn’t greatly matter that the artefacts, the weapons, the gadgetry, look the same in film after film. Obi-Wan (Ewan McGregor) still wears a kind of shortie bathrobe; characters still fight with light sabres; the aliens are the same exotic mixture of the cuddly and the grotesque.

In Revenge of the Sith even the sword fights look the same, especially in those endless one-on-one encounters: Palpatine takes on Mace Windu, Obi-Wan takes on General Grievous, Yoda takes on Palpatine, and there is a climactic struggle between Obi-Wan and Anakin. It used to bother me that the characters fought with guns and swords in an era of anti-matter reactors and goodness knows what advanced technologies. But every great work of the imagination imposes its own rules. We must accept it on its own terms.

Humour? Not much to speak of, unless you find the whole business unintentionally funny. But I liked Anakin’s sly parody of George W. Bush (“If you’re not with us you must be against us’’) and the slightly alarming vision of robotic midwifery during the birth of Padme’s children. Acting? Better than before, with McGregor giving Obi-Wan a likeable touch of world-weary exasperation, and Ian McDiarmid in splendid, cajoling form as the sinister, treacherous Palpatine. The special effects, of course, are incomparably good and the digital photography achieves a dazzling clarity.

Ending the series in the middle may mean that it has not really ended, and many will return to the original trilogy, if only to refresh their memories. In Lucas’s world, more prequels or sequels are always possible, even if we have to renumber the existing episodes, and I wouldn’t rule out an Episode VII or even a IIIA.

But I hope Lucas calls it a day. He has made six films of legendary popularity (even if two of them, Episodes V and VI, were directed by others), and as a self-contained body of work they eclipse, if only in sheer length, anything else in the cinema of fantasy. They will probably gain in our estimation if allowed to age gracefully.

Four stars